Thumbing at the world

Hitchhiking was my school of journalism

The most important teacher I ever had was not some Harvard professor, nor one of many newspaper editors who carved up my prose. It wasn’t even a person, a whole person anyway. It was an appendage:

My thumb.

Hitchhiking was my passion. Every car and truck became a classroom, every driver an instructor. I did it for years, short hauls and long, sometimes thousands of miles at a time.

When I dropped out of college halfway through sophomore year, I found a backpack and sturdy guitar case. I said goodbye to my stunned parents, walked out the kitchen door, tromped through woods I’d tromped since I could walk, and made my way to Route 128, the highway crescent around Boston. There I stood facing traffic, opposable digit extended, until someone stopped. I was on my way somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.

I made it all the way to Key West, crossed the South and reached Taos, New Mexico, where for the only time in all my hitching years I was ripped off — by a man whose life I had saved days earlier. At other times I hitched the West Coast to Seattle, the Pacific Northwest past the Rockies into high prairie with sunrise over my shoulder.

I’ve gone left-handed in Scotland, back to the right in Greece. I’ve only been arrested once, and that wasn’t for hitching exactly; vagrancy, sleeping under a boardwalk in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, biding time for sun and the next thumb.

Everyone who stopped had a reason, and a story. It was important to understand both, why you were invited to sit there as well as the bigger tale. Every ride became an interview, minus a notebook (until nightfall). I became good at nuances and inflections, distilling truth from bullshit.

Journalism 101.

Not that I always told nothing but the truth. And not that I enjoyed every ride. But this was important too, to remain civil, suspend judgement, understand how far to go and how honest to be.

Journalism 102.

Serendipity overwhelmed me.

On a whim, someone would stop and pick me up, carry me an hour or two, then leave me at another place and we would part — forever. Then, on another whim, someone else would pick me up, and on and on it went.

None knew the others. Yet the only reason I was able to meet any of them was because all of them, in sequence, put me in an available place and time. A chain of human links stretched hundreds, thousands of miles. I was the only one who knew the chain existed, who was aware that every link was essential to forging the next.

Life 103.

Road shoulders became sets; hey, I needed to make a good fast impression. I never wore sunglasses, always showed my eyes, never sat. I displayed my guitar and backpack to suggest I was a counterculture adventurer, a hippy-type, not a guy with a cardboard suitcase just out of the slammer.

My thumb imprinted one everlasting impression:

There is a wellspring of kindness and generosity coursing under the surface of many people, not often recognized or appreciated. I experienced it every day:

The pot-smoking bros who bought me a cheesesteak in Philly and threw down a sleeping bag in their apartment. The couple who lived on a farm outside Tallahassee, named their dog L. Ron Hubbard, and had me curl up beside him. The burly trucker who bought me a burger and beer in Gillette, Wyoming, then picked a guy up off a barstool who was giving me a hard time because I was Jewish and threw him into the parking lot.

I could go on, and on.

After that stint, I was ready to go back to school but changed my major from government to English. I knew I wanted to write — about people. I already had my degree, but went ahead and got another one, then hitchhiked to Cape Cod and landed a job working at a little newspaper called The Register.

I didn’t stop hitching. On Saturdays I’d slide onto Route 6A in Yarmouthport, thumb to Cookie’s in Provincetown’s West End for kale soup, thumb home before dark.

The main reason I eventually stopped, cultural shifts aside, was not because I got old:

After awhile, most everyone who picked me up knew me.

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